What is it about Tea Party Republicans?

These are the same peo­ple who turned town hall meet­ings into near-​​riots through­out 2009. They are the ones who were big on car­ry­ing guns to polit­i­cal ral­lies. They fan­ta­sized about armed rebellion.

There seems to be a pat­tern here of pol­i­tics through intim­i­da­tion. It was repeated in the  bud­get talks last week. Shout­ing “Cut it or shut it!” they nego­ti­ated Fed­eral spend­ing as an ulti­ma­tum, try­ing to alter our national pri­or­i­ties on mat­ters such as med­ical care for the poor, clean air, Health Care Reform, NPR, finan­cial reform — and threat­en­ing to shut down the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment if they didn’t get their way.

At the last minute, with the clock tick­ing, Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors found them­selves hostage to the most extreme ele­ments of their own party. They had lit­tle choice except to hold Democ­rats hostage or lose con­trol of the Repub­li­can party. Going for­ward from this point, if Repub­li­cans back down from the nar­row extrem­ist Tea Party pol­icy demands, they’re

Some­body get me a tissue

going to earn the ire of the very peo­ple who have been try­ing to intim­i­date the Democ­rats. The Teapers have already shown they’re will­ing to pri­mary Repub­li­cans all the way out of pol­i­tics, even will­ing to turn seats over to Democ­rats to pun­ish those of their own who don’t con­form. And in the vein much like wag­ging the dog, Speaker Boehner is hold­ing the tail of a rabid mon­grel and has no choice but to unleash it upon the Democrats.

But what is the end game? How much longer can elected Repub­li­cans knuckle under to the Tea Party pol­i­tics of intim­i­da­tion that is not only doing untold dam­age to their party, but even to the very nature of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal discourse?

Let’s look beyond the imme­di­ate man­u­fac­tured cri­sis over meet­ing America’s spend­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties. Paul Ryan has out­lined a floor­plan for dis­man­tling nearly a cen­tury of progress toward cre­at­ing pros­per­ity, for the sake of pla­cat­ing far-​​right talk­ing points. He has promised soon to pro­vide a plan to dis­man­tle Social Secu­rity in ways sim­i­lar to how he pro­poses to undo Medicare and Med­ic­aid. The goal seems to be to return to the Good Old Days of Her­bert Hoover, with 90% + of our seniors in poverty, eat­ing dog food and liv­ing on the street while they slowly die from untreated med­ical conditions.

Ryan’s blue­print doesn’t even get rid of the deficit. He pro­vides tax kick­backs to peo­ple in the upper brack­ets, cut­ting their taxes by almost the same amount by which he slashes domes­tic spend­ing. So as the mid­dle class is demol­ished and impov­er­ished, the wealthy élites con­tinue to profit.

The Tea Party seems to crave a vision of the past, an illu­sion of their aging demo­graphic that no longer exists and can no longer be pos­si­ble. Their fail­ure to com­pre­hend the changes going on around them is going to drag us fur­ther into a morass that will become harder to extri­cate our­selves from. Is this what we really want? Is this truly the world we want to be bul­lied into accepting?

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